Valve Reveals How PC Players Connect Joysticks – and What Kinds



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Video game controllers.
Enlarge / How do third-party controllers appear in the steam capture interface?

Fans of video games on PC inevitably indicate the options they have to play their favorite games, whether it is a keyboard and a mouse, a wide range of flight simulation pedals, or everything in between. But the data from the PC platform leader Steam reveal an interesting trend: millions of PC players are happy to experience the standard game console.

A Tuesday survey of Valve Software's hardware, the Steam Manager, reveals that "more than 30 million" users have connected at least one gamepad to a Steam installation. And with some users connecting multiple pads to their PCs, the total number of connected Steam controllers is close to 60 million.

Over this tracking period of about three years, the pad of the Xbox 360 has turned out to be the most popular, with 27.2 million registered users (or almost one per Steam account using the gamepad !). Other leaders of the console include the Xbox One pad (11.5 million, with no indication of separation of "Elite" pads), DualShock 4 (12.2 million) and DualShock 3 (4.1 million). ).

The charts show that Valve sold 1.3 million of its own vapor controllers – the first update of this statistic since the announcement of 500,000 sales in June 2016. The charts estimate that 1.5 million steam controllers connected to the Steam accounts. suggests about 200,000 controller records used for this device.

Another graph suggests that the majority of these connected controllers are not used regularly. According to Valve, only 20% of Xbox One Steam users have connected this pad to a Steam game in the last month. This is the highest percentage ratio for controller use over a 30 day period. For comparison, the PS4's DualShock 4 was only connected to a Steam game by 9% of interested users during the same period.

Valve seems to show this disparity with a goal. "Historically, the PS4 controller has not been treated as a PC gaming controller," says the Valve news post (which also evokes the simple plug-and-play nature of XInput's Xbox Pad API). "Integrated support is rare, so gamers turn to software that translates the input of their PS4 controller into the Xbox controller's input … [user count] The difference can be explained by the user experience, but it is obvious that the gap would be smaller if more titles benefited from transparent support. This statement is followed by the encouragement of PC game developers to incorporate a complete Steam Input integration into their products.

The number of controllers of 60 million includes peripherals outside the joysticks, and Valve pie charts reveal that some "traditional" PC control systems, including flywheels and are deeply deluded by other niche options like the plastic musical instruments (at the Rock band, Guitar Hero) and controllers of the SNES and GameCube eras. (Apparently, a statistically significant number of users connect N64 pads to their Steam accounts, so the console gets a brief mention in the "etc." pool.)

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